Conducting operations in field, emergency, or temporary situations suffer from communications challenges where network based, wired, line-of-site radio, radio, cellular, microwave, laser or satcom-based communications may need to be setup quickly by equipment operators. However, the equipment used to create such communications is complex and requires extensive training to set up and operate. The problem is exacerbated by the increasing complexity of the systems—required to support growing reliance on ever-more advanced communications methods such as cellular data, video, text chat, and unified communications.
Typically, to deploy these systems, organizations include the following types of networking equipment routers (used to direct the flow of voice/data), voice/packet compression and optimization equipment (used to reduce the size of network traffic over long distance radio links), PBXs (used to manage voice and video calls), digital radios and satellite modems (used to transmit data over wireless links), and firewalls, VPNs and/or encryption devices (used to ensure communications remain confidential and protected from network attacks).
Often, the equipment listed above is manufactured by different companies, providing different services—each with unique user interfaces and operator training requirements. This results in expensive training costs to educate operators on the equipment, lengthy setup times that often result in communications delays, system or communications downtime including when equipment is mis-configured, and system unavailability, such as when a lack of trained experts results in systems being left unused.
This problem is particularly acute in the setup and configuration of voice/video communications, which put a particularly difficult burden on equipment operators because of the complexity of those types of communications—voice/video is high bandwidth, real time, feature-rich—requiring multiple network devices to be configured in a cooperative manner, to facilitate the correct functioning of the transmissions. In order to configure the equipment appropriately, operators must be trained to diagnose and troubleshoot multiple, different network devices simultaneously, in real time.